Some new Jewish poll numbers

Some new poll numbers for the Jewish vote have Barack Obama down from last week’s Gallup poll, but still only a few points off John Kerry’s percentage of the Jewish vote four years ago.

The Washington Post reports that its Post-ABC News tracking poll finds Obama leading 70-29 among Jewish voters. That’s a few percentage points lower than Gallup’s three-week tracking poll of Jewish voters which was released last week, which had Obama up by a 74-22 margin. Kerry had a 74-25 percent advantage over Bush among Jews in 2004.

We’re trying to find out the margin of error and sample size for the Post poll, and will update this post if and when they become available. If the Jewish sample comes from the 1,805 registered voters surveyed over the past three days in the Post poll, that would mean the sample size is considerably smaller, and thus would have a larger margin of error, than the Gallup survey. (Gallup had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent for a sample of 564 respondents; 2 to 3 percent of a national sample of 1,800 — to match the Jewish population of the U.S. — would mean the number of Jews surveyed was probably no more than 55.) On the other hand, the Gallup poll was taken over a period of three weeks in October, while the Post-ABC poll was taken Oct. 27-30 — giving a better sense of what Jewish voters are thinking at the very end of the campaign.